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Source ISBN: 9780008300302

Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008300319

Version: 2018-08-16

Praise for Everyday Madness:

‘Everyday Madness offers a brilliant theory and definition of a modern malady, but what makes it so enticing is that it’s also a case study in the condition it describes. In other words, in identifying a previously undescribed territory, Lisa Appignanesi has wonderfully invented a previously unwritten form’

Adam Thirlwell

‘Keen-eyed, unflinching in her honesty, Lisa Appignanesi carries us down into the depths through an inner landscape of unappeasable turmoil, as she moves towards knowledge of love and the serenity it brings. With piercing insight and many moments of intense poignancy, she illuminates the complexity and costs of a remarkable and passionate journey’

Marina Warner

‘Wonderful, moving, extraordinary. It is sui generis. I feel enormously privileged to have read it – twice. Its structure is remarkable – an enacting of the last two years. Bravo, bravo’

Edmund de Waal

‘Thoughtful, challenging, illuminating, truthful and moving. We all bear losses. Lisa Appignanesi breaks the isolation and helps us endure them’

Susie Orbach

‘By deftly moving between the personal and the public, between childhood and adulthood, between the immediacy of feeling and the distance of reflection, Lisa Appignanesi constructs an anatomy of grief and its frequent but discomfiting attendant: rage. The private, the political, and the philosophical merge in a single story of a woman navigating the jolts, terrors, fury, and confusion that arrive after the death of her spouse’

Siri Hustvedt

Dedication

For John

and our first grandson,

Manny

Epigraph

Without the thought of death, it is impossible to make out anything in a human being. Its mystery hangs over everything.

SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH

The death of a loved one is actually also the death of a private, whole, personal and unique culture, with its own special language and its own secret, and it will never be again, nor will there be another like it.

DAVID GROSSMAN

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Praise for Everyday Madness